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Contact: Janine Lis, 410-273-5601 ext. 2256
Marketing Manager
Harford County Public Library


November 30, 2009
Authors and More at Library Book Fair!
Nine authors will be appearing at the Harford County Public Library Book Fair at Barnes & Noble in Bel Air on December 3rd. The library will also provide story times for the young ones and Wi games for all at this annual fundraiser.
The author schedule is as follows:
Bobbie Hinman, author of The Belly Button Fairy, 11 am - 1 pm
Tracey Kiely, author of Murder at Longbourn: A Mystery, 11 am - 1 pm
Loree Lough, author of Love Finds You in North Pole, Alaska, 1 pm - 2pm
E.D. Baker, author of The Frog Princess, 6 pm - 8 pm
Paula Hyman Chase, author of Flipping the Script, 6 pm - 8 pm
Stephanie Guzman, author of the Adventures of Oliver the Clownfish: Acting
Cool, 6 pm - 7 pm
Dr. Janet Horn, author of The Smart Woman's Guide to Mid-Life and Beyond:
A No-Nonsense Approach to Staying Healthy after 50, 6 pm - 7 pm
Steve Luxenberg, author of Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret,
7 pm - 8 pm
Henry Peden, author of A Guide to Genealogical Research in Maryland,
7 pm - 9 pm

The Library will also be conducting three story times including Tag Team from 11 am to noon; Mitten Time from Noon - 1 pm; and Laugh Out Loud from 1 pm - 2 pm. Later in the evening from 6 pm - 9 pm customers of all ages can play Guitar Hero World Tour and Beatles Rock Band!
To support Harford County Public Library, customers can either let the cashier know at checkout that they are there to support the library, or they can present the cashier with a Book Fair voucher. Vouchers are available at all library branches and online at hcplonline.info under the Hot Topics link on the homepage. A percentage of their sale will be donated to the Library.
The fundraiser runs from December 3rd through December 9th at any Barnes & Noble nationwide. It does not include purchases made online.
Harford County Public Library operates eleven branches located throughout Harford County, Maryland. The library serves over 200,000 registered borrowers of all ages and has an annual circulation of almost 5,000,000. The mission of Harford County Public Library is to provide access, service and information to the citizens of Harford County anytime, anywhere and to create an environment that encourages the acquisition of knowledge and the love of reading.

Happens Every Day: An All-too-true Story by Isabel Gillies

Isabel Gillies shares with readers her miserable year and a half in Oberlin, Ohio, when her husband left her for another woman and a professor of literature at that! This sojourn in Ohio was made all the more miserable by the fact that she had thought that this new life would be idyllic, homey, and marriage-affirming, rather than marriage–shattering. Ho hum...

Readers may at first rejoice in Gillies’s perfect marriage to a sensationally handsome and talented poet, who finally lands a position teaching literature at an exclusive private college, even if she isn’t quite able to describe his poetry and doesn’t seem interested enough in it to read it on her own. His one reading of a poem to her that she describes to readers baffles her. She says, “Man, it was dark. And truthfully I had no idea what it meant� (43). In fact, she doesn’t urge him to read any more poems to her, nor does she seem to read them on her own. Now, the guy is a poet by profession, and she thinks that she might have hurt his feelings by not discussing his poetry or asking him ever again to read one of his poems to her. Are these two headed for trouble, or what?

Readers may likewise pause to wonder just what Gillies celebrates in her move to Ohio. At first, this cosmopolitan New Yorker is horrified at the thought that she might have to raise her two adorable, we are constantly reminded, little boys in (shock, horror) the great provincial wilderness of Ohio, even if it is in a town only an hour from Cleveland and centered around a college that is one of our nation’s most progressive “mini-Ivies.� Readers may be tempted to sympathize with Gillies, who set aside her somewhat mediocre acting career to bear and raise children and move to the hinterlands with her husband. But think again.

Could it be that this tale of betrayal most foul is really a memoir that reveals more about the author than about a man who might have made a mistake in his choice for a bride? I do not condone infidelity; nor do I sympathize with Josiah, her husband, but readers may see my point that the book tells us very little about Josiah. What we do learn is that he gives up his four cats to suit Gillies. He apparently is a celebrated intellect in 20^th century literature and a poet of merit; we are not certain though, because we really get little sense of his accomplishments and his thoughts. We do know that he falls for an intellectual professor, who more likely shares a love of literature with him. We also know that apparently Gillies and Josiah fight quite viciously from the get-go. Even Gillies suggests that she should have seen the warning signs. Of what? His impending infidelity, or their unsuitability as a couple? One wonders.

In any case, Happens Every Day tells us a tiny bit about Oberlin College and its students, although the one student who speaks in the book comes across much like, as Gillies calls him, a surfer dude, which is unfortunate, considering the high academic standards necessary for admission and the vibrant intellectual life of the students there. But if readers would like a tiny taste of what it might be like to live in Oberlin for a year, one may want to try Happens Every Day…or maybe just drive to Oberlin and enjoy the campus without the hand-wringing and sobbing of poor Isabel Gillies in her agony of abandonment.

D. L. S.

Labels: Actors - United States - Biography, Divorce - United States, Happens Every Day, Isabel Gillies, Oberlin - Ohio, Oberlin College

The Blind Side, the movie directed by John Lee Hancock and starring Sandra Bullock, Kathy Bates, Quinton Aaron, Tim McGraw and Rhoda Griffis is now playing in theaters. Read more...

The movie is based on the true story, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis (Find this book in our catalog). PW’s starred review called it a “colorful saga of left tackle prodigy Michael Oher. Combining a tour de force of sports analysis with a piquant ethnography of the South's pigskin mania, Lewis probes the fascinating question of whether football is a matter of brute force or subtle intellect.�

Here's what it says about the book in our catalog: "The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school - such as, say, how to read or write. Nor has he ever touched a football.What changes? He takes up football, and school, after a rich, Evangelical, Republican family plucks him from the mean streets. Their love is the first great force that alters the world\'s perception of the boy, whom they adopt. The second force is the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist turns out to be the priceless combination of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback\'s greatest vulnerability: his blind side."

Labels: books to movies, football, inspirational nonfiction, Michael Oher

Opening on Friday, November 27 in New York and Los Angeles: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, directed by Rebecca Miller and based on her novel of the same name (Find this book in our catalog).
The movie stars Robin Wright, Alan Arkin, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Blake Lively, Maria Bello, Julianne Moore, Monica Belluci and others.
Miller is the daughter of Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis.
On December 4, the movie opens in San Francisco, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Kansas City and Seattle.

Labels: housewives - fiction, Humorous Stories, marital strife - fiction, middle-aged women - fiction

Wolf Hall: a novel by Hilary Mantel (Find this book in our catalog)
We all know the story of Henry VIII, but what about his adviser and, finally, victim, Thomas Cromwell? Mantel makes Cromwell and indeed all Tudor England her own, giving us a whole new picture of the wily statesman in a rigorously written work full of careful detail but driven by the drama portrayed. A model not simply of historical fiction but of literary endeavor in general. (LJ 9/15/09)

All the Living by C E Morgan (Find this book in our catalog)
"All the Living" has the timeless quality of a parable, but it is also a perfect evocation of a time and place, a portrait of both age-old conflicts and modern life. This lyrical and moving debut novel is an ode to the starve-acre southern farm, the mountain landscape, and difficult love--an unforgettable book from a major new voice. (catalog notes)

Short Girls by Bich Minh Nguyen (Find this book in our catalog)
A mesmerizing novel about estranged sisters and the cultural and family history that binds them Van and Linny Luong are as baffling to each other as their parents' Vietnamese legacy is to them both. Van, the quintessential overachiever, has applied the same studied diligence to her law career and marriage-a beau ideal that vaporized when Mr. Right walked out. Linny-pretty, fashionable, untethered-is grasping for purpose when her affair with a married man takes a humiliating turn. Each is the last person her sister would call, but when Mr. Luong summons them home for his American citizenship party, Van and Linny find themselves communing about their past-their late mother, their father's obsession with his Luong Arm invention, even the irony of their romantic straits. As these unlikely confidantes chart the uncertainty that defines them, they forge a tentative new relationship and the wherewithal to overcome disappointment. (catalog notes)

Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips (Find this book in our catalog)
Lark and Termiteis set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea. It is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us. At its center, two children: Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance. Around them, their mother, Lola, a haunting but absent presence; their aunt Nonie, a matronly, vibrant woman in her fifties, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months of the Korean War. (catalog notes)

Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen by Jason Sheehan (Find this book in our catalog)
Cooking Dirtyis a rollicking account of life “on the line� inthe restaurants, far from culinary school, cable TV, and theMichelin Guide—where most of us eat out most of the time. Ittakes the kitchen memoir to a rough and reckless place.From his first job scraping trays at a pizzeria at age fifteen,Jason Sheehan worked on the line at all kinds of restaurants: aFrench colonial and an all-night diner, a crab shack just off theinterstate and a fusion restaurant in a former hair salon. Restaurantwork, as he describes it in exuberant, sparkling prose, is a wayof life in which “your whole universe becomes a small, hot steelbox filled with knives and meat and fire.� The kitchen crew is afraternity with its own rites: cigarettes in the walk-in freezer, sexin the basement, the wartime urgency of the dinner rush. Cookingis a series of personal challenges, from the first perfectly donemussel to the satisfaction of surgically sliced foie gras. And thekitchen itself, as he tells it, is a place in which life’s mysteriesare thawed, sliced, broiled, barbecued, and fried—a place wherepeople from the margins find their community and their calling. (catalog notes)

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels by Janet Soskice (Find this book in our catalog)
In 1892, identical twins Agnes and Margaret Smith discovered what remains to this day among the earliest known copies of the Gospels. Soskice vividly recounts the story of two unlikely and unsung heroines in their effort to discover the Bible as originally written. (catalog notes)

This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper (Find this book in our catalog)
The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman family-including Judd's mother, brothers, and sister-have been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd's wife, Jen, whose fourteen-month affair with Judd's radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage, Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their patriarch's dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral together. In the same house. Like a family. As the week quickly spins out of control, longstanding grudges resurface, secrets are revealed, and old passions reawakened. (catalog notes)

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert (Find this book in our catalog)
A Short History of Women is a profoundly moving portrayal of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, chronicling five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first. (catalog notes)

Labels: best books

On 11/15/09 Library Journal announced its best books of 2009

Labels: best books

New Moon, the second movie in the Twilight Saga, based on the books by Stephenie Meyer, opens 11/20/09.

If you like books about vampires and werewolves, try the titles on my booklists now on Readers Place

• Vampire Fiction
• Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies

Labels: Twilight, Vampires-fiction series, Werewolves

The First Tycoon : the epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles Wednesday evening was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction. (Find this book in our catalog)

This is what it says in our catalog about this outstanding biography of the man said to be the creator of modern capitalism: "A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore� Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. Lincoln consulted him on steamship strategy during the Civil War; Jay Gould was first his uneasy ally and then sworn enemy; and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, was his spiritual counselor. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation—in fact, as T. J. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today. InThe First Tycoon, Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore’s personal life. It is a sweeping, fast-moving epic, and a complex portrait of the great man. Vanderbilt, Stiles shows, embraced the philosophy of the Jacksonian Democrats and withstood attacks by his conservative enemies for being too competitive. He was a visionary who pioneered business models. He was an unschooled fistfighter who came to command the respect of New York’s social elite. And he was a father who struggled with a gambling-addicted son, a husband who was loving yet abusive, and, finally, an old man who was obsessed with contacting the dead. The First Tycoon is the exhilarating story of a man and a nation maturing together: the powerful account of a man whose life was as epic and complex as American history itself."

If you like reading about powerful and visionary businessmen, you might like to read the books in my booklist, "Captains of Industry" now on Readers Place. Click here.

Labels: Biography, Captains of Industry, Cornelius Vanderbilt, First tycoon, National Book Awards

Labels: National Book Awards

Wolf Hall: a novel by Hilary Mantel (Find this book in our catalog)

I blogged about this book when it won the Man Booker Prize this year (Read more...). Now I have read the book and I think it is even better than the reviews!

With Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel (read more about the author) engages the reader with this familiar story of Henry VIII's divorce in a completely new and fresh way. To me the voice of Thomas Cromwell with which this story is told this is the most appealing aspect of an absorbing and fascinating and intellectually challenging book.

Thomas Cromwell is the narrator, and yet the story is not told in the first person but in the third, by a "he." "He" is in all the conversations and speaks Cromwells' words. It is as though the reader and Cromwell too are there as spectators receiving blow-by-blow commentary, and also both there looking out through Cromwell's eyes.

The story is about the Court of Henry VIII in the 1530's at the time of his courtship of Anne Boleyn and his seeking a divorce from Katherine of Aragon. The book is a powerful, fascinating, and detailed retelling of the court intrigue and politics of those times, the fall of Wolsey, and the rise of the Boleyns. It is also about the early attempts at religious reform, the controversy over the vernacular Bible, and the persecution, imprisonment, torture and death that was meted out to people of all persuasions from all sides.

Nothing is as it seems. Men and women rise and fall on the apparent whim of the monarch and yet everything is ruled by the urgent need to produce a male heir to the throne and ensure the stability of the realm. Hilary mantel's depiction of the universal panic at the thought of an invasion of England, which was thought to be inevitable if Henry died without a male heir, brings a fresh view to this well-known story.

Cromwell is there at every council, taking advantage of the instability to acquire more offices and more power. Mantel's portrait of Cromwell is a very nuanced one and a much more sympathic one than we are used to. "He" is a caring man and loves small dogs, he is a loving husband and father, a generous benefactor, neighbor, and employer. He is loyal and yet vengeful. He is principled and yet single-mindedly ambitious and ruthless. He is a polymath and a student of the scriptures. He is a great deal more intelligent than his opponents, and understands human nature only too well. And yet he does not seem to understand himself. He is "he" who speaks his lines and yet he stands away from himself. He is action and yet does not seem to allow himself feelings.

I am sure you will have a great deal of pleasure in trying to work out what drives Cromwell, and also in seeing the other familiar actors in this drama through Hilary Mantel's fresh eyes: Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, the Duke of Norfolk.

Throughout the book we hear of Wolf Hall where the Seymours, whose downtrodden daughter Jane is at court, are living in digrace. At the close of the book Cromwell is about to travel to Wolf Hall. Does he even understand his own motives? Have the political winds begun to shift again?

Labels: fictional biography, Henry VIII - fiction, Thomas Cromwell- fiction

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: a novel by Alan Bradley (Find this book in our catalog)

The books I like the best are the books where I find myself relating to the main character, where for a time I find myself, as it were, inside the character's own skin. This was very true with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This is what it says in our catalog: "In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950 and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw."

Perhaps I was able to relate to Flavia because she is eleven years old in 1950, a girl trying to have adventures in a cotton frock. She is constantly getting her dress filthy and ripping the soles half off her shoes. I grew up in the fifties in England and remember painfully how hard it was to ride a bike fast and yet modestly in a dress. I thought the author's depiction of the era was right on. Flavia is feisty, brave and resourceful, and yet everything conspires against her success, including the weight and age of her bike, her distant father, and her bullying older sisters. Flavia is the classic child on her own against the world much beloved of children's authors. She is Harry Potter, she is the Little Princess, and she suffers A Series of Unfortunate Events.

And yet this is a book for adults. It will remind you of books you read as a child; and yet you will admire the sophisticated wit, the understatement and the irony. Flavia is a brilliant child and adroitly manipulates all the people she meets to her own ends. She is quite cynical and understands people's motives only too well. The reader enjoys Alan Bradley's larger-than-life and yet somehow authentic characters, especially as they are revealed by Flavia in her own snippy voice.

I liked the wit and I enjoyed the gothic style mystery and the bizarre details such as the decaying Rolls Royce in the barn and the decaying auto repair shed at the village library. All is decay, but no detail is unimportant: the reader needs to keep awake.

The pacing is very appealing. You are drawn in straight away by the opening: "It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door." You know straight away that you are in for an embattled protagonist, dark secrets, violence and domestic misery.

Sure enough, Flavia's father is soon arrested for the murder and Flavia takes it upon herself to prove he did not do it. Her quest brings her face to face with some very adult issues involving love, loyalty, guilt, revenge, despair, vanity, and misunderstanding. At one time I thought I understood what the sweetness at the bottom of the pie was, but now I am not so sure. Perhaps when you have read the book you will understand.

Labels: 1950s, England - fiction, Murder mysteries, stamps, village mysteries

Last Friday the movie 2012 opened, starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover. This apocalyptic movie has a really cool viral website that tells more about the movie but which should be taken with a large pinch of salt! In fact, it has been severely criticised for scaremongering, and for blurring the lines between fact and fiction, science and pseodo-science. It's fun to visit, though! See what you think.

We also own Pinchbeck's DVD 2012 : science or superstition (Find the DVD in our catalog)

Labels: 2012, apocalypse, books to movies, new age, science, superstition

Labels: National Outdoor Books Awards

Believe it or not, the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, directed by Grant Heslof and starring Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor, is based on a true story. Read more about the movie...

Labels: books to movies, inspirational nonfiction, Men who stare at goats, War On Terror - Fiction

Labels: berlin wall, michael meyer, nonfiction, year that changed the world

Labels: books to movies, Precious, Push

Amazon has named Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin: a novel as its best book of 2009.

This is what it says about Spin in our catalog: "In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author's most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city's people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the artistic crime of the century. A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a fiercely original talent (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal."

Together with Let the Great World Spin, Amazon announced its list of its top 10 books of 2009 as well as best 100 books of the year, broken down into a number of categories.

Labels: Amazon, best books

Between now and the new year all sorts of magazines, newspapers, book reviewers and TV shows will be announcing their own personal takes on the best books of 2009. Publishers Weekly, on 10/28/2009 was an early entrant in the lists (pun intended!) with its Top 10 choice of adult books of the year. Said PW: "While PW has long done an annual best books list, this is the first year it has anointed a Top 10 list, which was chosen from more than 50,000 books submitted for review."

The Top 10, which include both fiction and nonfiction titles, are:
The Age of Wonder : how the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science by Richard Holmes
Await Your Reply: a novel by Dan Chaon
"The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways - and with unexpected consequences - in acclaimed author Dan Chaon's gripping, brilliantly written new novel. Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed. A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy. My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself - through unconventional and precarious means. Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored." (catalog notes)
Big Machine: a novel by Victor LaValle
"A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us. Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter appears, summoning him to the frozen woods of Vermont. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard The Voice: a mysterious murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, or a whisper in an empty room that may or may not be from God. Evoking the disorienting wonder of writers like Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, but driven by Victor LaValle's perfectly pitched comic sensibility BIG MACHINE is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt." (catalog notes)
Cheever: a life by Blake Bailey
"From the acclaimed author of "A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates" comes the unforgettable life of John Cheever, one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America." (catalog notes)
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War by Neil Sheehan
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
" Mueenuddin's collection of linked stories illuminates a place and a people through an examination of the entwined lives of landowners and their retainers on the Gurmani family farm in Lahore, Pakistan." (catalog notes)
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
"A haunting, if frequently hilarious, meditation on love and art, life and music . . . all reflected in the twinned mirror pools of Venice and Varanasi." (catalog notes)
Lost City of Z by David Grann
"After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed "New Yorker" writer Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century: what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?" (catalog notes)
Shop Class as Soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work by Matthew B. Crawford
" A philosopher/mechanic destroys the pretensions of the high- prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one's hands." catalog notes)
Stitches: a memoir by David Small
"One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. In Stitches , Small, the award-winning children's illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. (catalog notes)

Labels: Top 10 books 2009

Labels: Shadow Year, Tender Morsels, World Fantasy Awards